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Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)

From the album  Avis de tempête

Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane.  As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.

The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique.  Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).

Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing.  Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another.  An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere.  (Georges Aperghis)

February 20, 2010, 4:43pm